30-Second Ancient Rome

Concrete can support heavier loads and span wider gaps than the stone architecture of the Greeks, allowing freestanding buildings of enormous size and complexity. Architects grew increasingly bold with their dome designs, using pumice stone as aggregate to lighten the structure at the top, and imitating the ribbed curves of gourds. Even emperor Hadrian may have had a go, if we can believe the story that his court architect told him dismissively to “go away and draw [his] pumpkins.”

The development of concrete was one of the most important Roman contributions to architecture, allowing vastly more rapid and economical construction and new types of building. Early Roman concrete consisted of fist-sized pieces of stone (“aggregate”) set into a cement mortar, mixed with pozzolana, volcanic sandy ash that added strength and consistency.

The world of the dead was not immune to fashion or politics. Some elements of burial remained consistent, such as inscriptions giving name, family relationships, and rank or profession. Others changed: Rome shifted from inhumation to cremation early on, and back again in the second to third centuries CE. Changes could be abrupt—Augustus’s enormous mausoleum put an end to elaborate funeral architecture, forcing elite families to avoid charges of competing with the emperor by using simpler designs.

In its earliest phase, Rome was a cluster of hilltop villages. Their inhabitants needed a central place to meet and transact business, and to bury their dead, and chose the marshy area enclosed between four of the hills. As Rome expanded, this area was drained and paved in the seventh century BCE and started to acquire its first monuments, temples, and public buildings. Thus it became the Forum, the city’s center of commercial, civic, political, and religious life.

Whereas in Greek architecture the column was a structural element, transmitting the weight of a building’s roof into its foundations, in Roman architecture, massive concrete piers and vaults often carried the weight, meaning columns or columnar elements could be deployed as decorative details—in ever more elaborate arrays—without actually holding anything up.

veristic A style of Roman portrait sculpture that emphasized “warts and all” realism, favoring signs of aging to imply authority.

If the nature of the afterlife was uncertain, many Roman poets hoped to secure for themselves literary immortality. Horace boasted that in writing his poems he had raised a monument more lasting than bronze and so he would never completely die.

On several Roman tombstones are inscribed the letters “NF F NS NC.” They represent an abbreviation of a Latin tag meaning “I didn’t exist, I existed, I don’t exist, I don’t care.” These joky tombstones must have been favorites of philosophers like Lucretius who also insisted that death is nothing to us.

Lucretius, for example, taught that sex was best if engaged in unemotionally. This was because Epicureans believed the way to achieve pleasure was to become free from emotion and fear, especially fear of death and—more controversially—fear of the gods.

In a society that relied heavily on the distinction between slave and free, Stoics controversially claimed that we are all slaves to our emotions. Developing self-control to overcome destructive emotions and achieve peace of mind, particularly when facing death, was central to Stoic ethics. Moralizing anecdotes about “noble” suicides were popular, like that of the gladiator who, having no other option, calmly choked himself to death on a toilet sponge.